Avigdor Arikha was converted to pastel after witnessing the uncrating of a portrait by Jean-Etienne Liotard at the Cabinet des Dessins at the Louvre. “Its impact was such that I rushed to get pastels on the very next morning. I had not practiced this medium since the early ’50s,” the artist recounts in a preface to this quarter-century survey.

Mr. Arikha is a realist whose practice grew out of a dissatisfaction with abstraction. An interest in traditional materials and practices has earned him a reputation for his scholarship: He has, for instance, curated exhibitions at the Louvre, which explains his privileged access to the Liotard. The Romanian-born, expatriate Israeli has worked in Paris since the 1950s, and was celebrated in his early career for his abstract drawings and printmaking.

Pastel, in its pure color and fragile-seeming, chalky substance, can insist more than any other graphic medium on its physical, literal presence. It is perfectly suited to Mr. Arikha’s aesthetic. True to both his modernist and traditionalist heritages, he attaches great significance to working “alla prima” — that is, in one sitting, to be faithful to the physical and existential circumstances of the subject under view.

Through mastery of the medium, Mr. Arikha is able to tap pastel’s uncanny ability to describe light, texture, and tonal modulation with precision. At the same time, the technical demands of the medium are well suited to an inherent awkwardness in his handling, which gives a particular delicacy and warmth to his descriptive powers. Most moving is his self-portraiture, as in “After Surgery” (2007), in which the white of his nightshirt and head bandage have an almost sinister luminosity against the muted flesh tones and brown ground.

Besides portraiture, his most familiar motifs are of still lifes and landscapes observed from his workplace. These include a sanatorium spied from his Montparnasse studio window, or “Chinese Box” (2006), a random, close-cropped “working” still-life arrangement that includes his spectacles and a slide sheet. Translucent plastics are a recurring prop in his still-lifes, as not merely a perceptual challenge but somehow a metaphor for the elusive, transitory nature of vision.

Some of the strongest and pictorially most ambitious images are those that show pictures within the picture. In “Interior with Drawings” (1988), a wall of framed works surmounts a lush, red couch, glass reflecting the light, fabric absorbing it in a richly satisfying contrast. Depicting the studio entails both matter-of-fact pragmatism — this is what is at hand — and a romance of artistic vocation that is itself typical of this artist’s mix of empiricism and mystique.

Until December 8 (40 W. 57th St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-541-4900).